Written by Senior Program Officer Ricky Erway, the article distills recommendations from nine OCLC Research reports about digitization of and access to special collections.

LIBER provides the following abstract about the article: "In an environment where we increasingly have access to a collective collection of digitized books, special collections will become increasingly invisible if they are not accessible online. In an era of increasing expectations and decreasing budgets, finding ways to streamline some of our processes is the best way to enable us to do more with less. This report details a number of investigations into how access to special collections can be increased. It includes guidance running the gamut from digitization and rights management to policies and procedures."

The article is based on a presentation that Ricky Erway gave at the LIBER Annual Conference 2011 in Barcelona, Spain on 29 June 2011. Both the article and the presentation should be of interest to everyone who provides access to special collections.

All of the projects related to increasing access to special collections and archives undertaken by OCLC Research staff are organized under the theme of Mobilizing Unique Materials.

We are a worldwide library cooperative, owned, governed and sustained by members since 1967. Our public purpose is a statement of commitment to each other—that we will work together to improve access to the information held in libraries around the globe, and find ways to reduce costs for libraries through collaboration.